Chris Rock on the Music Business

The best humor is based on truth.

This was reprinted from The Lefsetz Letter

Chris Rock: Music kind of sucks.  Nobody's into being a musician.  Everybody's getting their mogul on.  You've been so infiltrated by this corporate mentality that all the time you'd spend getting great songs together, you're busy doing nine other things that have nothing to do with art.  You know how shitty Stevie Wonder's songs would have been if he had to run a fuckin' clothing company and a cologne line?

RollingStone: Plenty of rappers say, "I'm not a rapper, I'm a businessman."

Chris Rock: That's why rap sucks, for the most part.  Not all rap, but as an art form it's just not at its best moment.  Sammy the Bull would have made a shitty album.  And I don't really have a desire to hear Warren Buffett's album - or the new CD by Paul Allen.  That's what everybody's aspiring to be.

We live in a weird time.  No one knows who's smart - we just know who makes money.  "Hey, somebody invented Viagra!  We don't know their name, but we know Pfizer, because they make the money."  That guy made a pill that keeps your dick hard, and nobody knows who the fuck he is.  The pharmaceutical companies are like fuckin' record companies.  There's literally the Bo Diddley of medicine walking around, not getting his royalties.  He signed all his fucking pill publishing away.

("Rolling Stone", Issue 1039, November 15, 2007, page 157)